Black Feminist Epistemology or Bust: Challenging White Masculinist Thought-Models in Scientific Inquiry
Therefore, Black feminist “ . . . epistemology [is] profoundly rooted in lived experience . . . that prioritize women’s [subjective] experiences and ways of knowing and understanding the world” (Houston and Davis, 2002, p. 6). Taking the cue from constructivism, Black feminist epistemology seeks to shed light on the specific nature of individual experience as it is created, lived and felt by that individual (Schwandt, 1998, p. 238). A major claim in Black feminism is lived experience serves as a criterion of meaning. Black women for centuries have been utilizing lived experiences to create new meanings for themselves and others in order to deconstruct and transcend racist perception of who they are (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 258). In this endeavor there is no need for historical validation or to have the experience shared in a story, proverb, or narrative abstracted in analysis to become validated within overarching Eurocentric thought-models (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 258). Another claim is that if no one is going study the reality of Black women’s experiences, and their collective and interlocking oppressions then Black feminism must serves as the progenitor of a new mode of knowledge making and validation.
Toward this end, Allen (2002) provides a Black feminist thought-model for “emancipatory research on Black women” in communication studies (p. 21). This model serves as a challenge to the tradition of scientific realism in the social sciences and presents seven overlapping goals in an emancipatory research endeavor. They are to (1) emancipate Black women from gendered racism and negative social ascriptions that maintain such labels as “marginalized and stigmatized;” (2) challenge essentialist notions of Black womanhood that render Black women invisible or as representing their whole race; (3) study a variety of Black women to depict and “demonstrate our heterogeneity and complexity;” (4) study domination and suppression within the context of individually and collectively lived experience and link this to “broader social and institutional issues;” (5) discover Black women’s skills and strategies in confronting gendered racism to create a base of practical wisdom; (6) generate practical wisdom models for other Black women to emulate; and (7) use innovative and or nontraditional procedures and methods that honor our primary purpose (Allen, 2002, p. 24-27). Clearly, this model centralizes the concerns and ways of making knowledge that are critical to the survival of Black women in the United States.
What is known and how knowledge is created is central to epistemic concerns. Throughout the history of science, epistemological claims have been realist in orientation. These thought-models rely heavily upon a White masculinist view of world, which views the objective rational gathering knowledge as laudable. Black feminism, although severely marginalized, challenges this tradition through a distinct epistemology that celebrates the lived experience of Black women as valid criterion in knowledge creation. Opposed to ahistorical objective scientific inquiry in the social sciences, the Black feminist tradition believes a critical interpretation of history, through personal stories, narratives and ethnographic research, is necessary in the study of Black women. Generalizable knowledge is not the aim in Black feminist methodologies as this goal erases the distinctiveness of time and context. These considerations are crucial to subverting the dominant practices in the social sciences that uncritically homogenized or mute the oppression key in Black women’s experience and central to how they make sense of the world. With time the exclusionary realm of scientific knowledge will have no choice but to accept more critical and life-world oriented epistemologies, such as Black feminism, as legitimate vehicles for knowledge creation.